


The Pet Job

by Marie_L



Category: The Pretender
Genre: Fluff, Gen, Just Add Kittens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-24
Updated: 2016-10-24
Packaged: 2018-08-24 12:09:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8371846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marie_L/pseuds/Marie_L





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cyren2132](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyren2132/gifts).



The Pretend looked like an easy one, but Jarod didn’t expect it to be especially meaningful. An animal shelter, missing dogs and cats, distraught employees and pet owners. He honed in on the probable perp before even infiltrating the clinic, and expected it to be an open and shut case, although devising an appropriate punishment was still gleefully in the air.

But then Jarod stayed late one night in the kitten room, and the whole thing turned into a transcendental experience. That happened sometimes out in the real world; the most mundane of things could turn magical when tasted for the first time.

He’d encountered caged animals before — scientific experimental subjects, vet hospital patients, police dog kennels, farm animals locked in stalls — and it always provoked a little twinge of horror. Even when he knew it was for the good of the beings within, it hit too close to home for him to become comfortable, and he often had to fight the urge to peevishly flip open the latches and let them all run free. But the rescued kitten room tugged at everyone’s hearts. Most of them were destined to be adopted off anyway, and were only kept separated due to fear of fighting and disease spread. The logic wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t a high risk either.

Late one night, after sitting in the room watching them tussle and nap for hours, he stood up and pinched open all the latches.

It was one in the morning and most of the kittens were curled up in a barren corner on top of a rag and sleeping. He’d kept one light on through the nominal lights-off period, but the internal rhythm of the cat dictated that they conk out at this time of night, so most didn’t stir when he walked around and opened all the doors. So Jarod gently scooped them all out one by one and placed them on top of a soft blanket in the middle of the room. That woke them up, so thirty little fluff balls all wobbled up and sniffed one another before collapsing back into a purr pile. He let the one adult in the room go too, an older scraggy female named Eleanor with a severely cataracted eye, who often glared at the annoying babies out in the adoption room, but had never been known to injure them. She gave Jarod a scratchy scowl at the mewling youngsters in the room, and promptly sauntered over to the center of the pile and collapsed on top of it.

“Hey, make room for me,” Jarod told her.

He stretched out his tall frame on the blanket, with only that one layer of fuzziness between his back and the hard antiseptic clinic floor. The kittens recognized a perfectly good warm body when they same them, and proceeded to climb all over his chest . One decided his neck would make a good kneading post, and he carefully moved her into the crook of his arm with a small pillow for the tiny sharp claws.

Then, almost as if they were signaling each other, every fluffball began to purr. Even Old Eleanor decided to get into it, and curled up with her sinuous head hanging over his shin. Thirty-one separate lifeforms were all touching him, nipping at him, _loving_ him. And at that moment, Jarod loved them all back, with every ounce of childhood devotion that had been denied him all those years.

For that one Pretend, Jarod didn’t bait the Centre or send them clues to his whereabouts. He kept a low profile and hung around, making sure that each every one of those adorable cats got a good home. Plus Eleanor, whom he found a nice pair companion in a nursing home. It was part of his life’s mission, after all, to help the weak and vulnerable, and help them all escape every cage.

 


End file.
